More Marc Lynch

These three paragraphs by Lynch perfectly sum up exactly what’s been wrong with the Bush administration’s approach to the War on Terror, and leaves you to contemplate just how dire the consequences will be:

…I’ve written at length about how al-Qaeda has developed what I call a "constructivist strategy" - working primarily at the level of ideas, identity and public discourse. Osama bin Laden’s April speech could not have been more clear about al-Qaeda’s goal of promoting a "clash of civilizations" as the defining frame governing world politics. In what Gramsci might have called a war of position, al-Qaeda seeks to define the "common sense" of Arab and Muslim politics. Its metrics for success from this perspective are less the number of dead Westerners than the number of Muslims who have increased their identification with Islam or have accepted key elements of the al-Qaeda political narrative. Key elements such as: the idea of equating Israel and America as partners in the Zionist-Crusader Alliance against Islam; the idea that the West does not value Muslim lives; the idea that the West will never allow Islamist parties to win democratic elections; the idea that Islam and the West are locked in an eternal struggle which can only be decided by power rather than by dialogue or diplomacy, and that peaceful co-existence is impossible. I’d reckon that such ideas look a lot more common-sensical today than they did a month ago across the Arab and Muslim worlds…

While Bernard Haykal (whose work I respect) may be right that al-Qaeda fears Hezbollah’s competition, I wouldn’t take this too far: in this wider constructivist war of position, the Lebanon war has been a godsend for al-Qaeda (as they might phrase it). The Lebanon crisis could never be contained - even if the war does not physically spread to Iran or Syria, the images of the war have already done their work throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Just as Iraq served al-Qaeda’s strategy by supplying an endless stream of images of "heroic mujahideen" fighting against "brutal Americans" - and became less useful as images of dead Iraqi civilians began to complicate the picture - the Lebanon war offers an
unending supply of images and actions which powerfully support al-Qaeda’s narrative and world-view… without the complications posed by Zarqawi’s controversial anti-Shia strategy in Iraq. (In that regard, al-Qaeda’s open support for Hezbollah might even help to heal that Sunni-Shia breach which Zarqawi worked so hard to open against bin Laden and Zawahiri’s advice).

For Israel this may be a matter of defending itself against a threat on its northern border, but the United States should be able to see things in a wider global framework. I seem to recall something about a war on terror? And a war of ideas? The Bush administration and supporters of Israel’s war against Lebanon have been arguing that it is part of the war on terror. (Zawahiri, in his tape, agreed… for different reasons.) But I think this gets things directly and dangerously backward, and - like Iraq - demonstrates the bankruptcy of the hawkish approach to the war on terror. Winning the war on terror means discrediting al-Qaeda’s ideas and building a global norm against terror (the use of violence against civilians for political ends). It requires constructing a positive narrative - of shared interests and support for reform - which can compete with al-Qaeda’s narrative. The unilateral use of force, particularly when it resonates so intensely with the narrative frame you are trying to discredit, simply doesn’t help in this real war of ideas. The war on terror is a strong reason that the United States should have acted to
contain the crisis rather than giving Israel a free hand, not a reason for it to support the war’s continuation.